Liquidsoap: a High-Level Programming Language for Multimedia Streaming

TL;DR

Liquidsoap is a high-level functional programming language designed to simplify the creation and manipulation of multimedia streams, enabling highly customizable streaming systems beyond traditional configuration-based methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel high-level language specifically for multimedia streaming, allowing flexible, complex, and customizable stream generation and manipulation.

Findings

Supports complex stream generation

Ensures reliable execution of streams

Enables user-defined multimedia workflows

Abstract

Generating multimedia streams, such as in a netradio, is a task which is complex and difficult to adapt to every users' needs. We introduce a novel approach in order to achieve it, based on a dedicated high-level functional programming language, called Liquidsoap, for generating, manipulating and broadcasting multimedia streams. Unlike traditional approaches, which are based on configuration files or static graphical interfaces, it also allows the user to build complex and highly customized systems. This language is based on a model for streams and contains operators and constructions, which make it adapted to the generation of streams. The interpreter of the language also ensures many properties concerning the good execution of the stream generation.